One hypothesis that surfaced lately is that some people seem to think that having categories for predatorial and parasitical behavior patterns itself will encourage bad outcomes.
My intuition would be that having categories would make these behavioral patterns legible and recognizable to others, potentially defanging them. Of course, as soon as they’re “spotted,” behaviors will shift evasively, but the core problem here seems to be reifying object-level behavior that at some historical point for some people, coincided with predation (e.g. “nice guy behavior”) rather than identifying the higher-level, abstract patterns.
One hypothesis that surfaced lately is that some people seem to think that having categories for predatorial and parasitical behavior patterns itself will encourage bad outcomes.
My intuition would be that having categories would make these behavioral patterns legible and recognizable to others, potentially defanging them. Of course, as soon as they’re “spotted,” behaviors will shift evasively, but the core problem here seems to be reifying object-level behavior that at some historical point for some people, coincided with predation (e.g. “nice guy behavior”) rather than identifying the higher-level, abstract patterns.